‘People of a Feather’ Features Inuit Hunter Simeonie Kavik

People of a Feather

An Eider duck rooting for food at the bottom of a polynya, an ice-free oasis, in the film “People of a Feather.”Credit
Joel Heath/First Run Features

“The ice is harder to understand now,” the Inuit hunter and sculptor Simeonie Kavik tells us midway through “People of a Feather,” Joel Heath’s lyrical examination of the link between hydroelectric power and an endangered Arctic ecosystem.

For generations, Mr. Kavik and the rest of his small community on Flaherty Island in the Hudson Bay have studied the ice, for safety when seal hunting and to locate the prized eider ducks whose down keeps them warm. Clustered in ice-free oases — known as polynyas and maintained by the strong ocean currents around the island — the ducks can dive for food through the winter. But when, in the 1990s, the polynyas became unstable, and the ducks began to die off, the alarmed Inuit contacted the Canadian Wildlife Service.

Enter Mr. Heath, a patient ecologist and resourceful filmmaker. Ensconced in a lonely icebound shack for seven years, he observed how controlled runoff from Quebec’s huge hydroelectric dams was disrupting the seasonal rhythms of the Arctic ice. Using time-lapse photography, backed by the memories and oral histories of his Inuit collaborators, he illustrates these changes (and their far-reaching implications) more clearly than any chorus of experts.

Interweaving Inuit life today with re-enactments of the culture 100 years ago, “People of a Feather” warmly portrays a cold, uncertain present and a worrying future. Stunning underwater film of the ducks diving beneath the ice for sea urchins — and sometimes desperately searching for an exit — tugs at the heart. Whether it will also make us care that our apartment’s coziness could depend on the sacrifices of more than a fluffy little bird remains to be seen.